The present invention relates generally to the field of computer software. More particularly, the present invention relates to a computerized system and methods for distributed analysis of records of a patient population in view of certain clinical knowledge.
Standardized medical or healthcare knowledge (“clinical knowledge”) has traditionally been introduced to clinicians in a number of different ways. For instance, a clinician may participate in health-related degree programs at colleges or universities, or attend healthcare seminars, to gain clinical knowledge. Clinicians may also review a wide variety of information sources for clinician knowledge, such as professional journals, reference books and guides, and government agency notices. Uniform and widespread dissemination of portions of clinical knowledge over a large number of clinicians, however, can be quite difficult. For one thing, clinicians do not all consult the same sources for clinical knowledge. Moreover, time and resource constraints often force many practicing clinicians to simply conduct a cursory review of the sources relevant to their practice. Therefore, as new standards of care and related knowledge are accepted in the healthcare community, there is a problem with integrating this information into the practice habits of clinicians so that patients receive the highest level of care.
One method of improving the dissemination and review of healthcare-related information representing clinical knowledge is for clinicians to automatically receive such information through electronic updates. These updates may be delivered by enrolling with, for example, a listserv or other automated emailing list, enabling a large number of clinicians to receive the healthcare-related information with minimal effort. Even with the convenience and ease of these types of information distribution methods, however, a given clinician may not be capable of reviewing and retaining all of the clinical knowledge received over a given period of time. Furthermore, such a clinician may not have a manageable and efficient way to relate the information to a plan of care for each patient for whom the clinician provides healthcare services. To illustrate, suppose that a clinician employs an assistant or other clinician to review sources of new healthcare knowledge and pull all patient records to determine if the information has relevance to any particular patient's plan of care. Such a scheme would, unfortunately, be very time consuming, and open to human error due to the subjective interpretations of the assistant. In some instances, it may be impossible to discover and contact all of the patients that may be at risk in view of the clinical knowledge. One example would be when clinical knowledge includes an alert about a specific chronic health crisis such as new knowledge that a particular medication is inappropriate when administered to a certain patient population. In other instances, this method would slow the dissemination of clinical knowledge regarding new treatments.
A solution is needed for automating the review of patient records for a given healthcare entity to identify instances where certain acquired clinical knowledge has relevance to providing patient care.